MBAs going the doctor's way

Goldman Harvard recruit pledges to take ethics oath

BLOOMBERG New York, 20 May
When Larry Estrada graduates from Harvard Business School next week, he’ll begin work at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. He’ll do so only after taking an oath.

Estrada, 30, joined about 150 fellow business school students and faculty worldwide to campaign for the acceptance of an MBA ethics pledge modelled on the Hippocratic Oath taken by doctors. The aim is to get as many as 6,000 graduates at 50 MBA programs to swear they won’t put personal ambitions before the interests of their employers or society.

Created last year by Harvard Business students to counter a growing public mistrust of business, the oath is being championed by Nitin Nohria, the newly appointed dean of the school. After the global financial crisis, Bernard Madoff’s $65 billion Ponzi scheme and scandals at Goldman Sachs, there has never been a better time for managers to rethink their role in society, said Rich Leimsider, director of the Aspen Institute’s Centre for Business Education, in New York, which is helping to coordinate the movement.

“One of the things we’re hoping to do is force hundreds of thousands of people in business to talk about and think about their responsibilities,” Leimsider said. “Nitin has given Harvard a huge head start in that direction.”

484 MBAs

Last year, 484 new MBAs at Harvard Business School, in Boston, took the pledge, inspired partly by an article by Nohria and Harvard professor Rakesh Khurana, in the October 2008 issue of the Harvard Business Review, calling for a code of ethics for managers. About another 1,500 took it at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, and the Kellogg School of Management of Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois, and at other US management schools, Leimsider said.

“For me, it was a stake in the ground, to say here are my values, here’s what I believe in,” said Estrada, who plans to work as an investment manager for Goldman Sachs in Seattle. “When I have a tough decision, I want to be in a position where I have my own personal oath.” Not all Harvard Business students support the oath. About 45 per cent of the graduating class of 886 last year didn’t take it, and a similar share won’t this year, either, Estrada said.

The oath is “the knee-jerk reaction by business apologist to the current financial crisis,” Justin McLeod, 26, a Harvard Business student, wrote in the Harbus, a school publication.

Nitin Nohria, the newly appointed dean of the Harvard Business School, championed the oath

It seems the MBA boys are emulating the wrong people.
The doctors taking the hippocrates oath has become a joke, at least in India. It has now become an oath taken by hypocrites.

Here is part of the oath:

I will follow that system of regimen which, according to my ability and judgment, I consider for the benefit of my patients and abstain from whatever is harmful and mischievous.

I will give no deadly medicine to anyone if asked, nor suggest any such advice; likewise, I will not give a pessary to a woman to induce abortion.

I will live my life and practice my art with purity and holiness.

I will not cut persons suffering from 'the stone', but will leave this to be done by men who are practitioners of this skill. Whatever houses I enter, I will enter for the benefit of the sick, and will abstain from every voluntary act of mischief and corruption, and especially from the seduction of females or males, of free persons or slaves.

Whatever I see or hear in connection with my professional practice or not in the life of men, which should not be made public, I will not divulge, considering that all such knowledge should remain secret.

Now you judge for yourself whether the doctors on Northern India are following the oath.

Presntly the doctors in northern India do all the things that Hippocrates would be ashamed of and they are not there to serve the people but to serve themselves.

How then can you expect the MBAs to be different and be honest to their profession
The above is just a gimmick.
It looks as if Nitin Nohria who too heppens to be from India, his name is a giveaway, wants to get his name into the record books like Hippocrates.

The above is from the Businsess Standard of 21st May, 2010